Life in the universe? Almost certainly. Intelligence? Maybe not

May 12, 2009 By Alvin Powell,

Fisher Professor of Natural History Andrew Knoll describes the beginnings of life on Earth. Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office
(PhysOrg.com) -- We are likely not alone in the universe, though it may feel like it, since life on other planets is probably dominated by microbes or other nonspeaking creatures, according to scientists who gave their take on extraterrestrial life at Harvard recently.

Speakers reviewed how life on Earth arose and the many, sometimes improbable steps it took to create intelligence here. Radio astronomer Gerrit Verschuur said he believes that though there is very likely life out there — perhaps a lot of it — it is very unlikely to be both intelligent and able to communicate with us.

Verschuur presented his take on the Drake equation, formulated by astronomer Francis Drake in 1960, that provides a means for calculating the number of intelligent civilizations that it is possible for humans to make contact with.

The equation relates those chances to the rate of star and habitable planet formation. It includes the rate at which life arises on such planets and develops intelligence, technology, and interplanetary communication skills. Finally, it factors in the lifetime of such a civilization.

Using Drake’s equation, Verschuur calculated there may be just one other technological civilization capable of communicating with humans in the whole group of galaxies that include our Milky Way — a vanishingly small number that may explain why 30 years of scanning the skies for signs of intelligent life has come up empty.

“I’m not very optimistic,” Verschuur said.

Verschuur was a speaker at “Crossroads: The Future of Human Life in the Universe,” a three-day symposium sponsored by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the Smithsonian Institution, the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, and the Cambridge Science Festival.

The event kicked off with a showing of a popular science fiction movie, “Colussus: The Forbin Project,” before diving into more serious material. Topics included finding habitable planets, the rise of artificial life, human travel to Mars, and the idea that life might have a self-destructive streak. Speakers included Verschuur, J. Craig Venter, Freeman Dyson, Peter Ward, Andy Knoll, Dimitar Sasselov, Maria Zuber, David Charbonneau, Juan Enriquez, and David Aguilar.

Sasselov, professor of astrophysics at Harvard and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, agreed with Verschuur that life is probably common in the universe. He said that he believes life is a natural “planetary phenomenon” that occurs easily on planets with the right conditions.

As for intelligent life, give it time, he said. Though it may be hard to think of it this way, at roughly 14 billion years old, the universe is quite young, he said. The heavy elements that make up planets like Earth were not available in the early universe; instead, they are formed by the stars. Enough of these materials were available to begin forming rocky planets like Earth just 7 billion or 8 billion years ago. When one considers that it took nearly 4 billion years for intelligent life to evolve on Earth, it would perhaps not be surprising if intelligence is still rare.

“It takes a long time to do this,” Sasselov said. “It may be that we are the first generation in this galaxy.”

Several speakers hailed the March launch of NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which is dedicated to the search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Several Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics faculty members, including Sasselov, are investigators on the telescope mission.

Sasselov said he expects Kepler to quickly add to the 350 planets already found orbiting other stars. By the end of the summer, he said, it may have found more than a dozen “super Earths” or planets from Earth-size to just over twice Earth’s size that Sasselov expects would have the stability and conditions that would allow life to develop.

If life did develop elsewhere, Andrew Knoll, the Fisher Professor of Natural History, used the lessons of planet Earth to give an idea of what it might take to develop intelligence. Of the three major groupings of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, only the eukaryotes developed complex life. And even among the myriad kinds of eukaryotes, complex life arose in just a few places: animals, plants, fungi, and red and brown algae. Knoll said he believes that the rise of mobility, oxygen levels, and predation, together with its need for sophisticated sensory systems, coordinated activity, and a brain, provided the first steps toward intelligence.

It has only been during the past century — a tiny fraction of Earth’s history — that humans have had the technological capacity to communicate off Earth, Knoll said. And, though Kepler may advance the search for Earth-like planets, it won’t tell us whether there’s life there, or whether there has been life there in the past.

Related Stories

Research presented at a recent astronomical conference is being hailed as ushering in a new era in the search for Earth-like planets by showing that they are more numerous than previously thought and that scientists can now ...

Our planet is changing before our eyes, and as a result, many species are living on the edge. Yet Earth has been on the edge of habitability from the beginning. New work by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for ...

In recent years researchers have found hundreds of new planets beyond our solar system, raising questions about the origins and properties of these exotic worlds—not to mention the possible presence of life. Speaking at ...

Harvard scientists have unveiled a new laser-measuring device that they say will provide a critical advance in the resolution of current planet-finding techniques, making the discovery of Earth-sized planets possible.

Extraterrestrials will probably never ‘phone’ Earth in a way we’d understand as they’re unlikely to have evolved human-like intelligence – but that doesn’t mean we should give up the search for life beyond our ...

An international team of astronomers has observed the peculiar activity of a nuclear transient event known as PS1-13cbe. The transient, which occurred in the nucleus of the galaxy SDSS J222153.87+003054.2, experienced a rapid ...

A team of astronomers from Israel, the U.S. and Russia have identified a disrupted galaxy resembling a giant tadpole, complete with an elliptical head and a long, straight tail, about 300 million light years away from Earth. ...

The path of light is bent by mass, an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity, and when a massive galaxy or cluster lies along our line-of-sight to a more distant galaxy its matter will act as a lens to image the ...

We are the only "intelligent" life in the universe? HAHAHAHA- The universe is what 20 billion times older than we are and with trillions of stars. We have explored less than .00000000000000000001% of space. Funny.

"Life in the universe? Almost certainly. Intelligence? Maybe not"
This is stating faith not science. There is no basis for a decision one way or the other. For one reason, the sample set is far too small.

We are the only "intelligent" life in the universe? HAHAHAHA- The universe is what 20 billion times older than we are and with trillions of stars. We have explored less than .00000000000000000001% of space. Funny.

My sentiments exactly!! This article and the scientist stating this absurd opinion is utter nonsense.

We can barely detect planets outside our solar system yet we are going go out on a limb and proclaim life may not be intelligent elsewhere, based on what???

The size of the universe is so vast it's almost incomphrensible where in as already stated in the above quote their seems to be an infinite amount of stars.

In other words, I call bullshit. We cannot reach this conclusion based on the technology and the information we currently have.

He didn't say we are the only intelligent life in the universe he said "Using Drake's equation, Verschuur calculated there may be just one other technological civilization capable of communicating with humans in the whole group of galaxies that include our Milky Way..." which is good news given that even his pessimistic assumptions indicate there could be one other intelligent technological species out there. Given slightly less pessimistic assumptions it could be more..

The Drake Equation can produce any desired conclusion based on whatever inputs you feed into it. If Verschuur started with pessimistic inputs, then he would get a pessimistic outcome. Others have used the same exact equation, with different inputs, and concluded that our galaxy is teeming with life. The simple fact is that we haven't the vaguest notion of what the inputs actually are, and thus all conclusions are meaningless.

In particular, I would question how this guy decided what the average "lifetime" of an interstellar civilization is. (Exactly how many interstellar civilizations has he visited?) Okay, if you assume these civilizations last 1000 years each, then, yeah, they're always going to be pretty darn sparse. But if you assume they last a billion years each, then the universe is probably crammed with them. And how could a civilization spanning, say, a million star systems (which is only 0.00025% of our galaxy) ever go completely extinct anyway? It seems like only a war could do that -- but even then, the winners of the war would recolonize the dead zones.

Reemember Fermi's paradox. There may be plenty of bacteria and lichen out there, but since we do not detect signs of intelligent aliens already crawling all over the galaxy, the odds are we are in fact the first *intelligent* ones here in the Milky Way. This is on account of the time factor, and the short *geological time needed to spread through the galaxy (less than one per cent of the age of the galaxy). It would be very unlikely that we exist in the brief time after several intelligent species evolve, but before they overrun the galaxy.

Reemember Fermi's paradox. There may be plenty of bacteria and lichen out there, but since we do not detect signs of intelligent aliens already crawling all over the galaxy, the odds are we are in fact the first *intelligent* ones here in the Milky Way.

...or that we lack the tools to detect other civilizations. If faster-than-light signaling exists, then it is almost certain that interstellar civilizations will use it, which explains why we pick up nothing on the EM bands we're scouring. If you had a brother on Alpha Centauri, would you want to wait 4.37 years for him to pick up the phone every time you call?

This is on account of the time factor, and the short *geological time needed to spread through the galaxy (less than one per cent of the age of the galaxy). It would be very unlikely that we exist in the brief time after several intelligent species evolve, but before they overrun the galaxy.

You are assuming that these aliens would have the same level of moral development as humans. But if their morals are evolved much beyond those of us animals, then they may have set up protections for "nursery planets".

Also, you're assuming that these aliens would *want* to live on planets. Empty space would be much more economical, due to its abundance. And you don't have to deal with the gravity wells that planets are stuck in. After a few million more years of evolution, who's to say whether we humans will have any further use for planets? Or even stars? Perhaps we'll colonize the space between galaxies. Nice and roomy. Of course, we'd need power generation, building materials, etc, but those should be trivial problems for a million-year-old race.

People are right that this article contains very little facts. It is a hypothesis.

I actually think it has some merit though because even if life is reasonably common on planets with the right conditions, evolution of life does not necessarily tend towards intelligence. It tends towards ability to survive.

Think about it....we've got a fairly long term experiment running right now...

The earth has been around for a long time...it teems with life, but it is only home to a single intelligent species (and only has ever housed the one as far as anyone knows).

Judging from the history of our race, periods where the population was very low, it seems a miracle that we were able to evolve this far.

Why is it so absurd to assume that intelligence is rare? It seems like decent reasoning to me from these points alone.

It reminds me of George R. R. Martin's books that share the same futuristic universe, where humans have colonised the universe so much they have forgotten where they came from...but have never run into anything they can have a conversation with (except a sentient mud rock :P ). Plenty of animals...no intelligence.

Think about it....we've got a fairly long term experiment running right now...

If their are billions of stars why is intelligence rare??

Are their any other earth like planets in space???

We don't know thats why we cannot assume it's rare.
The earth has been around for a long time...it teems with life, but it is only home to a single intelligent species (and only has ever housed the one as far as anyone knows).

Judging from the history of our race, periods where the population was very low, it seems a miracle that we were able to evolve this far.

Why is it so absurd to assume that intelligence is rare? It seems like decent reasoning to me from these points alone.

It reminds me of George R. R. Martin's books that share the same futuristic universe, where humans have colonised the universe so much they have forgotten where they came from...but have never run into anything they can have a conversation with (except a sentient mud rock :P ). Plenty of animals...no intelligence.

Maybe I am a gullible simpleton, but I agree with Kurzweil that we are advancing at an accelerating rate. We have only been reasoning beings for, oh I don't know, maybe on the order of thousands of years? Yet so much has happened in the last few hundred years, or the last twenty, what with the internet and all.

A few thousand years hence, and we won't even resemble what we are now. We will have unimaginable powers (if we survive, of course) and we MIGHT move out into the universe, but I think that by then we will consider the universe, that which we see around us right now, to be a very boring place. I think it likely we will have moved on to other dimensions, built other universes, who knows.

I have a lot of respect for our present level of intelligence, but to any species that had the power to reach us, we would be about as interesting as slugs (no offense to slug lovers) or even simple microbes.

We have a long way to go and a bright future, but we may never meet any species at the same level as our own.

Sometimes it seems a lonely existence for mankind, but geez, we've got intelligence right here! When you get right down to it, the guy living next door is an intelligent alien. So make contact.

Heck, I am no environmentalist, but I was blown away the first time I saw a video of an elephant painting. Yeah, I know they were taught what to paint, but you can just tell that they kind of get the general idea and actually seem to enjoy it. We have more in common with elephants, a species that could be considered to be a million years or more behind us in intelligence, than we do with a civilization that is merely a thousand years ahead of us - they would appear as gods to us even if we could see them (cloaking, remember?)

I would like to turn the assumptions in this article on their head by lookng at it from the other direction. What if our plant is really not a great place for life to evolve ? It seems that it is because we are here and adapted to it, but with all the late stage bombardment, planet-wide ice ages, comet and meteorite strikes, volcanic events and mass extinctions, it is not so much a miracle that intelligent life evolved, it is a concequence of these set-backs and false starts that that it took so long and it is testament to its tenacity and adaptability that life made it through. This bodes well for life being present on other planets and where there is life it will naturally evolve towards complexity and intelligence, and it may happen much quicker on other planets in other environments. As to why we haven't received their radio signals, well, as has been suggested, who is to say that they will be in the tiny span of their evolution where such crude devices are used - imagine Galilaeo looking up at Jupiter saying, there is obviously no intelligent life there because I can't see any semiphore flags.

This is stating faith not science. There is no basis for a decision one way or the other. For one reason, the sample set is far too small.

"Life in the universe? Almost certainly. Intelligence? Maybe not"

This is stating faith not science. There is no basis for a decision one way or the other. For one reason, the sample set is far too small.

Yes. These people are being extremely parochial. Are we the 'exception'? How human centric! And, certainly we are self-destructive, but, again, why should that be the rule?
Oh well, we will probably not get an answer in our lifetimes. I do hope...

If you consider Neanderthals shared probably 99.99% of our genetic code then the intelligent species of Earth is still narrowed down to one branch of the hominid family.

Even looking on Earth, where we know at least one intelligence to have evolved, some estimates have put bacteria as 50% of all biomass on the planet. So yes, the vast amount of life is bacterial, even here. Now consider life existing in the harsher regions of the galaxy will be bacteria, such as extremophiles, and have no chance of ever evolving to higher lifeforms unless conditions improve.

Quite frankly the arbitrary number of intelligent species quoted in the article is irrelevant, whether it's one or ten or ten-thousand, the amount of bacterial life out there will still be several orders of magnitude greater.

I cannot help but agree with the article; radio intelligence (and if you're arguing lots of advanced intelligence exists, lots of intermediary intelligence will also exist) is observably rare and unless you're going to claim there is no extraterrestrial life, period, this explanation is a pretty good one.

I don't see Fermi's Paradox as a problem for multiple reasons. The SETI program is very ambitious, but can only look for signals in very small bandwidth, areas and sensitivity. With SETI's power you couldn't even detect our unfocused radio signals from the next star system. So the aliens would have to be purposely sending towards us. Why would aliens be doing this? If they physically surveyed earth a few million years ago they couldn't be sure that the apes would evolve significant intelligence. If they only surveyed the Earth through telescopes they couldn't have seen any signs of civilization further than a few thousand years ago. So only aliens within close range would see that we are now technologically advanced.
It's silly to assume that aliens use radio to communicate. Just look at us, most of our communications now go through fiber optic cables or are narrowly transmitted. In the future communication seems much more likely to be done with lasers which can contain more information and focus it.

I also don't see why evolved civilization would have huge empires. Again looking at us we see that the more we develop the less children we have. In western europe there are already countries with declining populations due to people not wanting more than 2 children. So even if we expand to other planets who will be making all these children, and why?

I'm sorry but people making guesses about intelligent life being rare is equal to saying that people that lived in some remote island thousands of years ago thinking they were the only human inhabitants on the earth.

I am amazed at the incredible arrogance of the scientists and most of the respondents.
It would appear that their views are more theologically based than scientifically based.
Out of our monumental ignorance (and in this I am referring to our brightest minds) we assume that we are somehow special and unique and we also assume that all life must be like us.
We do this when we do not fully understand ourselves and our planet let alone other planets.
I would expect that life is the norm for the entire universe.
I would not be surprised if some life forms were chemically different to all that we know, so different that our hospitable environment would be toxic to them. But as we have no experience of such life systems we have no way of knowing one way or another if this is possible.
So how can we possibly presume to declare that we and we alone are the sole intelligent life form.
Because we have no direct evidence of other intelligences we should not close our mind to the possibility that there are such life forms.
As far as Drakes equation is concerned it does not constitute even a good guess let alone a reliable formula.
We need to enormously increase our intelligence, do a lot more research and be far more patient because at the present stage of our intellectual development we find our best theory for the present state of the observable universe is 80% short of the matter it needs to support the theory.
That strongly suggests that as a species our ignorance far outweighs our intelligence.

I Believe Life on Earth and particularly Intelligent Life on Earth is "Rare" or "Special". Given that the Universe has an estimated 10 to the 80-82 power atoms. This is, indeed, a large number. But If you look at the unique circumstances that the Earth and its Solar System possesses, It looks to be an extremely rare gem. The size,location are critical as well as the stability of the orbit. The Moon (ideal in size) has help to stabilize our rotation. The Earth's magnetic field & atmosphere helps to shield us from the deadly solar radiation that would kill most life. We also are in a good location in the Milky Way, not too close to black holes, supernovas and other phenomenon that could produce deadly gamma ray bursts that would kill Earth's life pretty quickly. We also had have about the right number of collisions with other planetoids,asteroids and comets to help spur life's development and not kill it all off here. There are also a myriad or other circumstances I haven't mentioned that are necessary for Life, its survival and its development. So while given the tremendous number of potential planets, stars and other known and unknown conditions out there, The factors having to be just right lead me to take a skeptical "I believe it when I see" attitude. I venture that no extraterrestrial intelligent life will be found in my lifetime or in the lifetime of anyone currently living.

Microbes are the dominant form of life on earth, by some measures. They occupy more niches, are more numerous, and have more of an impact on the planet than any other life forms. With no warp drives allowed the galaxy could still be "colonized" within a few hundred million years. But what would the colonizers looks like? This would be technology so advanced it would appear magical. If the solar system has been visited the evidence would probably be in the outer planets. Saturn's rings would be a good place to look. Small rocky planets would be uninteresting. I'd assume that long before the migration began, the putative super-civilization would have discovered by other means just how prevalent intelligent life is in the galaxy. They'd have no interest in communicating, as such. The most important information they could impart would be their own presence, discoverable in due time. There's nothing we could say to them that would be of any interest.

@Cybrbeast - While it may be true that certain areas show recent decline in population, that isn't indicitive of the whole planet. Some areas, China & Japan come to mind, are increasing. I don't see lack of repoduction being a problem anytime in the next serveral milenia.

@Luckybrandon - Bravo! I knew I could count on you to take up the slack while I was gone :)

@Everyone else - First off, whenever this topic comes up, there is one phrase thrown around that makes me giggle. "Life as we know it". Why do we assume that only carbon based life can exist? If there is one undisputable fact we HAVE learned, it's that life will find a way. Extremophiles are a prime example of this. While yes they are carbon based, they definately were not life as we knew it then. Which brings up another point. Life as we know it is in a constant state of change and revision. Just because something worked on this planet ina certain way, doesn't mean it would work on ANY other planet out there. That being said, and knowing that life will find a way, there are likely thousands of ways some form of sentient life could evolve.

We are limited to only what we have seen and studied, and honestly, we haven't even gotten that right yet.

Even if intellegent life is limited to 2-10 species per galaxy, there would still be billions of other races out there. Some more advanced, some less, and some right in the middle.

Any less advanced you can pretty much write off. Same with those around the same level as our own. If we can not leave our own solar system, it's quite probable that they couldn't either.

That leaves us with those that would be more advanced. Now you can see even here on our own planet what happens when a more advanced group gets involved with a less advanced group. I personally couldn't see a more advanced race making contact with us while we can't even manage to get along with the races we have on our own planet, unless of course they were coming in to take over. In that case sure, go ahead and fight each other, makes the invader's job easier! lol.

Couple that with how insanely huge space is, and you also have to stop and think, gee, maybe they just haven't found us yet.

With our current level of advancement, we are still mostly dependent on another race initiating contact. An advanced civiliation doesn't get to be advanced by being short sighted and stupid. If they are aware of us, it is likely contact would only be made once we have managed to get our proverbial shit together as a species. Untill then? Yeah it is kinda lonely here.

1) We cannot call it pessimistic to think that life is rare in the universe. The rarity of life is neither good nor bad, scientifically.

2) The understanding is pretty simple... if in a billion stars, only a few hundred million can support life, and of said life supporting planets, each supplies hundreds of millions of species, but, as per our example, only one of hundreds of millions of species achieves sentience...

It's very easily quite possible that the universe would have to be orders of magnitudes larger in order to support a second sentient lifeform, statistically.

I am amazed at the incredible arrogance of the scientists and most of the respondents.

It would appear that their views are more theologically based than scientifically based.

Out of our monumental ignorance (and in this I am referring to our brightest minds) we assume that we are somehow special and unique and we also assume that all life must be like us.

We do this when we do not fully understand ourselves and our planet let alone other planets.

I would expect that life is the norm for the entire universe.

I would not be surprised if some life forms were chemically different to all that we know, so different that our hospitable environment would be toxic to them. But as we have no experience of such life systems we have no way of knowing one way or another if this is possible.

So how can we possibly presume to declare that we and we alone are the sole intelligent life form.

Because we have no direct evidence of other intelligences we should not close our mind to the possibility that there are such life forms.

As far as Drakes equation is concerned it does not constitute even a good guess let alone a reliable formula.

We need to enormously increase our intelligence, do a lot more research and be far more patient because at the present stage of our intellectual development we find our best theory for the present state of the observable universe is 80% short of the matter it needs to support the theory.

That strongly suggests that as a species our ignorance far outweighs our intelligence.

The reality is, we shouldn't have happened, but we are here; so why shouldn't others, that likewise shouldn't have happened? To say that we are somehow alone seems to give the claim a metaphysical significance that goes beyond the realm of physical science. I'm sure the attendees at the Harvard get-together did not want to go there, but to say that we are it on the basis of some pretty mathematics alone seems awfully close to being there.

As for coming up empty-handed in the search for other intelligent beings in the universe, perhaps those beings have advanced beyond the use of such low-tech, low-speed means as electromagnetic radiations for communications. Besides, why would they want to talk to us; after all, the vast majority of humans still delight in being carnivores, devouring billions of their unfortunate fellow creatures annually. Sign of true intelligence?--hardly.

In their star map to our galaxy, the Earth is most likely labeled with a warning marker--the dominant species: carnivorous with rudimentary intelligence; the most dangerous kind of life to be avoided.

The argument here seems to me to boil down to us either underestimating or overestimating ourselves i.e. the human race being too insignificant to be of scientific interest to a more advanced civilisation, as if ants weren't of interest to entomologists, or conversely, that the human race is in itself 'uniquely' intelligent, as if we could ignore the evidence for higher level reasoning and tool manipulation in other animals gathered in recent decades.

Given that to probe the universe for intelligence of whatever variety (truly sentient or not) would require at the very least a basic form of artificial life, able to self-replicate and spread itself throughout the galaxy (surely soon within our technological grasp), it is indeed a mystery as to why we haven't been contacted by other civilisations, should they exist. The Drake equation is statistical probability (with all of its inherent weakness) for wont of evidence. A concerted effort to explore Mars or the moons of Jupiter for microbial evidence, be it in the fossil record or living, would greatly aid in the effort of providing proper and qualitative input to the Drake equation; and answer once-and-for-all, the question (and greatest of assumptions) of whether life is indeed commonplace in this universe. It will not however, answer the inherent mystery of us being alone.

Perhaps in the face of this we must ask ourselves a new set of questions?

@Cybrbeast - While it may be true that certain areas show recent decline in population, that isn't indicitive of the whole planet. Some areas, China & Japan come to mind, are increasing. I don't see lack of repoduction being a problem anytime in the next serveral milenia.

Japan isn't increasing that much. Furthermore I point you to the UN which has recently predicted Earth's population to level off at around 9 billion due to development of countries. The estimation used to be around 12 billion, but this has been decreased steadily due to increased development.

I think this is a successful attempt to reconcile the drake equation with the fermi paradox. He may have some of the variables poorly estimated, but they likely closer than the estimates we used to have. This should be obvious since the old variable estimates predicted we would have much evidence of intelligent life other than ours.
N=1 ==> manifest destiny?

Its just like the average family. 2.4 childeren..., one boy, one girl and a dog/photocamera....
So if we are unlucky, all those alien species are like the Japanese and take all their cameras with them ;-)

No animals (or Japanese people) were hurt during the making of this comment.

Verschuur's comment, "may explain why 30 years of scanning the skies for signs of intelligent life has come up empty" really pissed me off with its arrogance. Thirty freakin' years and we already are drawing conclusions? We're not sophisticated enough yet to even PERCEIVE other life, unless it looks exactly like us, of course.

"Sasselov, professor of astrophysics at Harvard and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, agreed with Verschuur that life is probably common in the universe. He said that he believes life is a natural %u201Cplanetary phenomenon%u201D that occurs easily on planets with the right conditions."

IS THIS BASED ON THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OR BELIEF ON DR. SASSELOV'S PART?
------>>>"...occurs easily on planets with the right conditions."

Has Dr. Sasselov observed life originating easily on any planet? Or, is this statement based on his existing evolutionary beliefs?

Ask some of your colleagues (if you work in academia) to see if they can help answer! Oh, wait a minute. They may fire you for even questioning the particles-to-people evolutionary religion...

The distinction between intelligent life and unintelligent life is extremely antropocentric. The brain/body mass ratio puts a couple terrestrial species ahead of humans. If we can believe that, given a million more years of evolution, species like chimpanzee or dolphin or elephant might develop culture, language, etc, get caught up in the whirlwind advancement that comes with mass interaction (starting with language), then the question becomes: when can life of eukaryotic equivalence evolve on other planets?
The drake equation will become more and more useful over time, as our inputs become more and more informed. It is, however, very easy to get any result you want from it, so surprising outputs should only be given credence if the inputs are reasonable. I didn't see any of the inputs listed in this article, which I found startling!

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.